Mary Robinson

Mary Robinson (1757–1800), born Mary Darby in Bristol, became an actress at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Her performance as Perdita in The Winter's Tale (1779) caught the eye of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and she was known afterwards as 'Perdita'. Their liaison was brief, and she later lived on a pension and on her writing.

In the 1790s she turned to poetry, publishing Sappho and Phaon (1796), a sequence of sonnets, as well as novels, essays and political writing, and she contributed verse to the Morning Post. Lyrical Tales (1800), a volume of narrative poems that took its title in answer to Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, appeared in the year of her death; she died in December 1800 at Englefield Green, Surrey.